11/13/2015 05:57:00 pm -
Reported by
Marcus

The three day celebration of Doctor Who, saw fans queuing from the early hours of Friday morning for a chance to meet stars Peter Capaldi, Michelle Gomez, Ingrid Oliver, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss.

The festival follows on from the 2013 Doctor Who 50th anniversary celebration, also held at ExCel and features floor shows and presentations as well as panels with the writers and stars of the series.

Peter Capaldi told the assembled press of some of the hazards of playing the Doctor, revealing that he has had an operation on his knee to repair damage caused by the constant running down corridors. It was an injury previously suffered by Matt Smith.

I had keyhole surgery on the meniscus membrane. It got torn and it doesn't grow back so they had to snip it away to make it all fine. I was worried that it would get worse, because they couldn't do the surgery while we were filming. But I’ve become rather drawn to the cane that I had. Obviously I wanted one with a silver fox or a skull on the handle.

Capaldi denied he had agreed to direct two episodes of the HBO series Veep.

I’m not. A journalist asked what I was doing and I said I’d been asked to direct a couple of episodes of Veep but I couldn’t because of Doctor Who. But that is not what was chosen to be printed

Steven Moffat revealed that the casting for the new companion had not yet taken place.

We went to the BBC yesterday to talk about the type of person we might be looking at. To my unending terror, we have not yet finished episode 11 and episode 12 is nowhere near finished so we haven’t actually delivered the show yet.

The festival continues over the weekend where the team will be joined by Jenna Coleman.

A small number of tickets are available for Sunday. The Festival then moves to Sydney next weekend.